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Archives For Online Learning
10 Highly Selective Colleges Form Consortium to Offer Online Courses – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
After announcements of the major Ivy League institutions forming loosely structured collaborations in EdX, Coursera and other alternative models we shouldn’t be surprised to see other respected institutions joining forces. When you see the list of the following institutions agreeing to work together to allow their students to share online credit you must finally acknowledge that online learning has begun to disrupt Higher Education:
- Brandeis University
- Duke University
- Emory University
- Northwestern University
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- University of Notre Dame
- University of Rochester
- Vanderbilt University
- Wake Forest University
- Washington University in St. Louis
How can small private Liberal Arts institutions compete with these types of collaborative efforts. Will this be the beginning of the end for the small Liberal Arts University?
[wpvideo fHrtfvvS]
For those of us who have been watching this space what Bill Sams is suggesting is not new or surprising.
What a Tech Start-Up’s Data Say About What Works in Classroom Forums – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Jeffery Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education shared an analysis of research conducted by Piazza, a start-up company that manages online discussion forums for thousands of courses, on online interactions among students and professors in 3,600 courses at 545 colleges and universities over a period of 18 months. The data revealed:
- highest gains in student understanding when discussion was less strictly marked
- students at highly selective universities are far more likely to ask questions anonymously than are students at other institutions
- the practice of asking students to post a comment to introduce themselves correlated with more-robust discussions
These finding are no surprise to those of us in the academic community who have been using online discussions to enhance both classroom and online courses. Perhaps now the dataset for this study is large enough to finally appease even the most vehement opponents to online instruction.
Then again…will there ever be enough data and evidence to fully convince the detractors of online and digital learning?
http://youtu.be/SA6ELdIRkRU
EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.
